Free Marketing Advice

If you market your business online or use your website as a means of generating leads, then it’s important that all visitors have an optimum user experience to make sure they carry out your conversion goals. These conversion goals could be to fill out an online form, make a purchase or to simply call your business.

Why The Increase?

A big factor in the increase in mobile users has been the development of 4G availability in the UK. Data from 2014 showed that 4G subscriptions leapt from 2.7million at the start of the year to 23.6million by the end of it, quicker loading times has meant that browsing on the go is no longer a slow frustrating experience.

The increase in 4G connections along with the fact mobile devices are in our pockets and readily available means smart phone users on average now spend nearly two hours every day browsing the internet.

Won’t A Normal Desktop Website Suffice?

In a word, no.

If advised correctly, your desktop website should have been optimised overtime to the point that you are receiving high conversion rates across your traffic channels, whether that is PPC, organic search or something such as display advertising. The positioning of call to actions, the length of body content and the size of images including the way they all work together on the page will have been perfected with a desktop user in mind.

Just because it’s a success on desktop browsers, though, doesn’t mean you will have similar success if you serve this website to mobile visitors, in fact, it’s quite the opposite.

A mobile user does not want to deal with slow loading times, having to zoom in and out to read text and they most definitely do not want filling out a contact form to be a long laborious tasks. A responsive/mobile website will prevent all these issues.

Mobile Friendly: What you should be doing at a minimum

Not every business is in the financial position to build a brand new bespoke responsive website, so below are a few points that, at an absolute minimum, you should be paying attention to:

Make sure your website responds to all screen sizes

Not all mobile browsers are on an iPhone, and even if they are, the viewports on an iPhone 6 and an iPhone 5 are different. Make sure your website responds to different viewports/screen sizes so you are not alienating any users.

Call to actions need to display with mobile users in mind

If you have a call to action such as “Click here for a free quote” make sure the button is big enough for the user to press on their touch screen, and has adequate padding around it so they are not accidently clicking other links when it’s the CTA that is demanding their attention.

Test site speed, to decrease load times on slower mobile connections

There are a variety of online website speed testing websites. We’d advise using Google Pagespeed, as if you get a thumbs up from Google, this is likely to be closely associated with how Google ranks mobile responsive websites.

Click to call numbers for easy contact

Make sure any phone numbers are “touchable” and when pressed they make a call directly from the browser, similar to CTA’s make sure these are away from other links and can be easily called.

Easy to complete contact forms

Make sure your contact forms are mobile friendly, if you are measuring conversions based on people completing a form, don’t give them a reason to leave your website without converting by serving them a complicated form process.

Next Steps:

The above steps only highlight the basics you should be getting right, with mobile websites and mobile marketing importance growing, there are many more features and standards that you should adhere to. But for now the above should be a good start.

To improve your websites mobile performance, you have a couple of options. You can possibly convert your existing code with the help of one of our team to a responsive format. Or what we would really recommend, is creating a new website that has mobile users in mind from the start, allowing you to optimise the user experience and design as best as possible.

If you would like to discuss either a mobile website or mobile marketing with us, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.